How People Describe Their Daily Commute On Social Media [Infographic]

If you live in a big city, there is a good chance you take some sort of public transportation to and from work each day. I ride the train to my clients’ offices sometimes, and it’s a refreshing change from driving in gridlocked downtown Atlanta traffic. If there was ever a time when we need our smartphones to keep us from going stir crazy, it’s during the daily commute. On any form of public transportation, you can usually look around to find everyone on their smartphones endlessly typing.

I knew that people use their smartphones incessantly during their daily commute, but what I didn’t know until today is that the main thing people talk about on social media during that time is the commute itself, if that makes sense. Whether it’s a tweet to say “the bus is late again” or “traffic is extra bad today,” we apparently like to let everyone in our virtual world know about our commuting experience.

This infographic called The Life Of The Connected Commuter by Column Five and IBM (using the IBM Social Sentiment Index) analyzes the daily commute in many large cities around the world based on what people are saying about it on social media. Each city has a percentage listed based on the positive and negative buzz that particular city’s commute gets on social media.

If you don’t like dealing with that frustrating commute each day going to and from the office, you can choose from a few different things to fix that. You can orchestrate your circumstances so you can work from home. You can move to a small town where the commute is barely noticeable, or you can avoid living in the cities on this list that receive a ton of negative buzz about the commute.

This is another great example of how online chatter can be formulated into data, which can then be used to make assessments about things in our lives we like to talk about. In this case, that would be our daily commute.